Cataloging Years of Photography from Many Drives!

[Asher Kelman]

Decades ago one could take a full hard drive and drag it’s image on the desktop to the icon of Iview Media Pro and it would be cataloged by media kind & type, file size and date in a minute or so.

All pictures could seen in a scrollable page of icons ordered anyway one could imagine. Duplicates found in seconds!

Today sadly that seminal software now owned by Phase One is no longer updated and doesn’t even run on thr latest Mac OS!

Let’s look at the best currently available:

Mylio does give a checkerboard layout of icons in Calendar view, but one has to SEPARATELY import every damn folder separately from each of one’s packed full hard drives: so clumsy!

On1RAW 2023 brilliantly allows simple import of that whole drive and a catalog is made of all its contents, excluding duplicates.

But try searching across several On1 catalogs for duplicates among various On1 hard drive catalogs, it searches for hours of need be but always gets a rotating ball of doom or crashes.

That occurs even with 64 GB RAM, 1/2 TB free space on the start up drive an empty desktop and ONLY On1RAE 2023 running!

So, tell us what catalog software do you use that is robust and allows ingestion of many hard drives?

Asher

 

[admin]

You are using a Mac. I think that Apple wants you to use "Photos". There should stills be an option to built a "library" while leaving actual files in place, I think. That should do the job, shouldn't it?

I have sent the crash logs to On1. That fact that ingests an entire drive of say 50 folders, means its an amazing advantage over Mylio.

But Mylio gives a perfect calendar array of icons by year, month or day! I hope my feedback might result in getting these folks to make their great software superb and robust competitors!

Asher

 

[Robert Watcher]

I find on1 photo raw to be my favourite software and one of the most frustrating. The Browse file structure and Cataloging need to be managed or it’s endless spinning balls and Force Quit. I never bother sending the Report to on1. Too many and doesn’t resolve anything.

Recently I thought I was being smart by adding my whole Photos folder of around 8TB - 250,000 images and thousands of sub folders - to the Catalogue, hoping it would speed up accessing all the files when I need them. It ended up taking days or maybe weeks adding everything “in the background” and when I tried opening on1, it took minutes to attempt to load a screen, used up almost all of my internal MacMini SSD, and ran my computer out of resources. So frustrating when it was fruitless trying to remove folders from the Catalogue and getting no where. A big part of these issues I believe is related to the Catalogue always syncing with the main drive, and so sometimes I’d delete an outer folder presuming all inside would be gone as well - only to go back in to the Catalogue and recognize a whole bunch of new folders listed which were sub directories of the one I removed. I was ready to scrap on1 permanently.

I sent a support ticket to on1 asking if there was a way to find where the cached files (for Catalogue) were stored so I could just delete everything. I did get a reply with directions two days later. But meantime I had gone ahead and deleted the on1 application and did a deep search for anything on my Mac drive that had to do with on1 in Library etc, and deleted them. I reinstalled on1 - all catalogues were gone and the application loaded quickly and even folders of files in Browse loaded quite quickly so that I could work on them. I learned my lesson, and have just added a folder to Catalogue related to a project that I am working on, so that I can those quickly. It’s been working like a charm with no spinning balls and no Force Quits so far.

So that is how I am using on1 with pretty good success. The only time I have found Browse folder to take a little bit of time to load is when I have been trying to browse a folder with 10,000 or so files in it. But they do come in without seizing. Now I am working at breaking my folders up to small numbers of files of maybe a max of a thousand or two.

———-

https://freefilesync.org/ is my go to Mac program for managing all of my hard drives, including syncing with my external Work SSD where I keep all files for current projects. It will also check for duplicates.

What I did to consolidate the files on around 12 2&4 TB portable hard drives of my travel photography, was to purchase a 14TB WD hard drive and Mirror every portable drive to the big drive using Free File Sync app. It handled the process flawlessly including leaving out all matching duplicates that were on the different drives. So I now have one new Master Drive that is connected to my macmini all the time. It is organized the way I want and has no duplicates. I can view any of those files in Browse with on1, but most often I will copy what I want fast access to, to the external SSD. Anything that I’m working on or new downloads from my cameras SD cards, go onto the fast 1TB external SSD that I access and manage with on1. I then use Free File Sync to sync the SSD to the Master Drive, just adding updated files and no duplicates to the big slower storage drive.

Sounds complex and kind of is, but isn’t too bad and has worked well for the number of images and type of organizing that I want. And working this way allows me to use all of the great features of on1 Photo Raw without all of the frustration that seams to be inherent in on1.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Robert,

So amazingly useful a report. It essentially duplicates my own experience. I had already decided to consolidate my files on a QNAP ZFS RAID, designed from thr ground up for efficient robust massive data management.

So that could replace the function of your 14 TB drives.

I like the idea of relying on On1 for just the set of files you are currently working on after you discover them on your 14TB vault!

…but what was their reply?

Asher

 

[Robert Watcher]

The reply from on1 as far as my request to find out how I could delete the catalogue from my computer drive was:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting ON1 Software.

Try deleting the settings file and ’Reset ON1 PHOTO RAW 2023’
This will nuke all caches, databases catalogs and albums.
You’d need to recreate any catalogs and albums for any that were created in ON1 PHOTO RAW 2023.

(Or if ON1 PHOTO RAW 2022 is still installed, these would be remigrated after doing so)

Quit the app and then on relaunch hold down the shift key.
This will prompt you to delete settings file.
Click the Reset ON1 PHOTO RAW 2023 button

WARNING:
This will
**RESET AND REMOVE ALL THE PROGRAMS CATALOGED FOLDERS, ALBUMS AND CACHE**

But WILL NOT harm your images or edits.

Note:
If you have any cataloged folders or albums, you would need to recreate these after doing this.

 

[Robert Watcher]

I don’t have a raid system and I just use inexpensive drives. The 14TB WD drive is this one from Best Buy https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-eas...-3-0-hard-drive-black/6425303.p?skuId=6425303

Years ago, I ran a Raid NAS drive. But didn’t find it benefited me. It maxed out at 2TB size drives, so I ended up just scrapping the Raid and setting the drives to JABOD so I’d have the most real storage out the hard drives. And then I got hooked on small portable hard drives and never touched the big NAS again…

Being I was always travelling after 2007, I carried a stack of small portable 2 and 4 TB hard drives in my camera bag. I had matching pairs for working drive and copy to backup drive. When I got home to Canada, I would copy these onto a second backup drive stored there. Now that large drives are available at the cost that I used to pay for my 4TB drives, and I’m not travelling but working on a desktop - I like having full use of the 14TB hard drive where there is currently only 1-1/2 TB left. Raid would either chop that amount up into smaller duplicate drives, or I’d be paying a lot for a system that would handle a bunch of redundant drives. Being that I am using a fast SSD drive ($100) as my working drive, I am fine with the slower hard drive.

I keep all of the old portable drives that I transferred to the big drive - so have all kinds of backups if ever wanted to hunt through them. The one fear I initially had of the cramped space little portable drives failing, has never happened once in the 15 years I’ve been using them. I’ve probably been lucky.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Well I must have some 30TB of files over dozens of drives!

I have no idea how many duplicates!

So I have 8 12 TB drives and will likely make a 7 drive RAID 6, with 2 drives replaceable and approx 50TB of space, enough for housing and sorting all my drives which I will then deduplicate and backup online to Backblaze.com

 

[Asher Kelman]

I plan to copy to an SSD files I am working on with their ON1 carslog

That should, from your experience be well within ON1/Mylio’s limits.

For seeing files as icons and choosing what to work on next, Mylio would win out as it’s closest to the Gold Standard, “Media Pro”!

But hopefully, both companies will compete and improve by looking at where the other application does it best!

Asher

 

[Asher Kelman]

Still Robert, I’d love to hear your experience with ON1RAW 2023 replacing Photoshop CC for major layered editing with masks!

Also whether it’s better than Infinity Photo?

Asher

 

[Robert Watcher]

I consider on1 photo raw more as my Lightroom replacement. I am able to do most work and organizing there. I export files into Affinity Photo when I need extensive work, just like when I used Photoshop in the same way with Lightroom. I am not convinced that either program is better or even as good as the Adobe products, especially the comfort level and ease of knowing exactly how to get the results I need from close to 20 years of using those applications on a daily basis. On the other hand I made a choice to get rid of the Adobe subscription and I am getting along just fine without them. As well I do so much work on my iOS devices now and am not so reliant on my desktop applications.